


Schrödinger's PhDs

by gendzl



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Excessive Swearing, Falling In Love, First Meetings, M/M, vague science kind of happens in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 07:53:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21071471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: He has six of them. Kind of.





	Schrödinger's PhDs

**Author's Note:**

> [Marge holding a potato labeled "these two nerds"] I just think they're neat.
> 
> I...very much do not go here. I watched the first movie, once, several months after it came out. I have, however, trawled thru the ship tag, because y'all write utterly _fantastic_ fic and I'm a slut for men who are snarkily in love with each other.
> 
> Please accept this humble offering.

“It’s a little…convenient, isn’t it?”

Newt glances up from his desk, eyes bleary (when was the last time he slept? check that, when was the last time he looked away from his work?). “Excuse me? Who are you? _What’s_ convenient?”

The stranger is standing just inside the door of his cramped office/workspace/lab—it isn’t small, just…full; strategically packed—lips twisted up in a slight smirk. Newt refuses to think he’s cute, just on the principle that it’s, like, 8:30 and he’s been running experiments since 4 this morning and who does he think he is, looking at him like that and—

His thoughts are cut off by the man finally responding. It’s been several seconds, at least, of them just staring at each other to the background hum of overworked machinery. Newt also refuses to think too hard about _that_.

“_Six_ PhDs?” is all he says.

Newt sputters. “What? Dude, who the hell are you to come in here and—“

“Doctor Hermann Gottlieb. I capped out at a very respectable _two_ PhDs.” There’s that half-smirk again. “I’m afraid I’m your new partner.”

Newt latches onto that last thing, fully ignoring the implications of the other thing. “Oh, thank GOD. I’ve been doing all this shit myself for weeks and I asked—well, told—them to get me some help before I dropped dead but I didn’t think anyone had actually listened to me, so just. Here. Take these. You know how to—? Great.”

And they’re off.

* * *

They’ve crammed two weeks of work into five days before it comes up again. Newt is still running flat out and on fumes, but at least with Hermann (_Gottlieb_, insists the only sane part of his brain, the part that isn’t distracted by the man’s facial construction) he’s running on regular coffee fumes and not, like, the residual side effects of inhaling formaldehyde. (It was one time. The headache had not been even a little bit worth it, and now he follows much stricter lab safety protocols.)

(Comparatively.)

In the meantime, they’ve proven a bunch of stuff that nobody but them cares about, and a few things that other people care about quite a lot.

“Six PhDs?”

Newt looks up from his half of the office—Hermann had taped it off immediately and Newt had spent the last five days glaring hard at the side of his face for it—and glares. Hard. Harder than he’d already been glaring. It makes his face hurt a bit, actually.

He shoves his glasses back up the bridge of his nose for the nth time that day. “Yes. Why do you care?”

Hermann shrugs and walks over to the wall where Newt had hung his degrees in the few quiet moments between getting his lab and the next barrage of attacks. He is well over the taped line.

Newt is far too smitten to comment on it.

Hermann looks over at him, eyes curious. “All of your degrees were issued in 2022.”

Newt tenses. “Yeah.”

“How’d you get them?” His voice is carefully neutral.

“I—what?! By going to school; how’d you get yours?”

Gottlieb turns to face him, leaning more heavily upon his cane than he had been at the start of the day. Newt tries to focus on that and not on the hammering sound of his heart in his ears. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

“I’m just saying, it’s a bit overkill. You’re smart. Probably still would have gotten the job without them.”

“What?”

Hermann just smiles enigmatically and walks to the door. “I’m getting dinner.” He leaves.

Newt is still gaping at the doorway when he leans back in to say, almost softly, “I won’t tell anyone.”

_Fuck._

* * *

“How did you obtain this position?”

It’s been two days since the last time this came up. Most of that time has been spent in a wary sort of silence that only seemed to be bothering Newt.

“Same way you did, I expect. Ran off half-cocked—“ he looks Hermann up and down briefly (he’s scared, not dead) “—or maybe full-cocked in your case, shouting theories and questions and demanding a lab.”

Hermann just nods and looks back at the papers strewn in front of him. There’s a filched kaiju phalanx serving as a paperweight at his elbow; Newt tries very hard not to find that endearing.

“They _did_ interview me,” he adds belatedly.

* * *

The truth is that Newt couldn’t muster up all that much righteous indignation because Hermann was right.

Newt did not have six PhDs. He didn’t even have _one_.

He’d done the schooling for them; he wasn’t completely stupid. He knew the things he said he knew.

He’d just. Paid someone else to prove it.

A bit.

In his defense, universities on the coast (all coasts) had stopped issuing degrees and almost uniformly turned their facilities into glorified think tanks, and he’d been transferred from MIT to a school further inland. He had only a semester left before he’d defend his dissertations.

Six of them, all at once, because he’d been working on them all simultaneously, deftly juggling a mass of credit requirements so that he’d finish them all together. What can he say, fifteen-year-old him had thought it would be cooler than staggering them.

That decision came back to bite him in the ass, but, again, in his defense: nobody expected aliens.

He’d been transferred out without so much as a how-you-do and after only three weeks at the University of Boise he’d realized that he could (should) be doing much more to help if he could just get a job, so he put everything on hold and started applying.

Only nobody wanted to hire a career academic with no degrees, and talking himself blue in the face did no good. He couldn’t convince anyone that he knew what he was talking about; he was just some young punk in skinny jeans and glasses with an overgrown sense of importance and too many tattoos and it was KILLING HIM so he finally just stuffed his many theses into a drawer and left to do something about it.

Things turned around then. He’d worked his way up to his current position while nobody checked his credentials too closely because, God, they were just so relieved that he was there at all, and he had some answers (not a lot, but some), and suddenly he was here, on the frontlines, working as hard as he could to prove to himself that he had made the right decision.

He’d hung his forged degrees on the wall so he didn’t forget what he’d sacrificed, in the long run, to get here at all.

(He still didn’t know what made Hermann see what nobody else had.)

* * *

It’s a few months into their acquaintance (is that what they’re calling it? what do you call a person who knows a secret big enough to ruin you, who would never even think to use it, who looks at you like you’re simultaneously the worst and the _best thing_ about their day?)—and Newt still feels like his world is going to crumble around his ears whenever Gottlieb glances at him—when he accidentally slips into German.

It wasn’t his intention to surprise Hermann with it (he has a tattoo in German on his forearm, for fuck’s sake) but that’s what happens anyway.

It’s been a long morning of Hermann muttering to himself in their native language when Raleigh comes in to ask how they’re progressing. Newt looks down at the pile of shit on his worktable and says scornfully, “Ich habe zu wenig geduld dafür.”

Hermann startles so severely he knocks his cane to the ground. “Since when do you speak German?”

“Since childhood?”

Their bickering starts up again, in German now, and Raleigh steps back out the door unnoticed.

They make much needed progress on at least two fronts, that night.

* * *

Newt expected a lot of things out of post-arrival life, but he hadn’t expected to actually _win_. He had never expected to be part of a team that would figure it out, taking increasingly larger risks until they managed the impossible and saved the fucking world.

* * *

Six days after halting Armageddon, surrounded by the lab’s usual detritus and increasingly-fewer alien parts, Newt turns to Hermann, too exhausted to hide the affection written across his face. “Now what?”

Hermann settles his free hand on Newt’s shoulder. “Now, we go home.”

* * *

As for the PhDs, well.

Hermann raises his eyebrows in amused silence when anyone mentions them, but, bless him, never says a word.

Newt never says anything either. At this point it's just embarrassing.

Three years after everything is resolved, when the world is starting to look a bit like they remembered it from before, a letter arrives to their home from the University of Boise. Someone in the office had found his theses, and thought perhaps he'd like to know that, in honor of his fine work and assistance on behalf of humanity, his PhDs had been granted to him. A bit late, they apologized, sorry.

Tucked behind the letter were six pristine documents, identical to those that had hung in his lab in all respects but one—his name.

_Newton Gottlieb._

**Author's Note:**

> Also in the letter from Boise, naturally, is a donation request (seeing as how he's an alumnus and all).


End file.
